This family saga opens with a short chapter titled “Bloom” describing how love blossoms between a young couple, feckless Nick Becker and statuesque Karin Sundersson, when he introduces her to smoking weed: “He could not have said what he wanted, but when he and Karin stretched out on his bed, smoking in the dark, he was content. Some things are outside of thought.” The rest of the novel details what happens to them and their entire family circle; the story picks up years later, its events all transpiring between the months of March and June, with flashbacks to earlier times. Nick’s job requires frequent travel, and Karin is unwell, ostensibly home-schooling their middle-school-age daughters, Juni and Tilde, but mostly neglecting them. When Karin dies suddenly, Nick falls apart, so his mother, Eleanor, and Karin’s mother, Helve—the girls’ grandmothers—are called to the rescue. The two older women neither like nor trust each other, but they must work together to navigate the necessary logistics of burying Karin, relocating Nick and the girls, and enrolling Juni and Tilde in school. Each is also dealing with her own challenges: Eleanor’s husband, Walt, has recently moved out, Swedish-born Helve is widowed, and both also lost their own mothers while young. Because Nick and Karin mostly kept to themselves, the grandmothers, especially Eleanor, haven’t had much contact with Tilde and Juni and are unaware of the true extent of the girls’ parents’ instability and how deeply it has affected them (while Tilde seems to adjust quickly to her new life, Juni struggles, both in school and at home). Meanwhile, both Eleanor and Helve learn that their husbands have kept secrets, and other family members, including Eleanor’s adult daughter, Alison, weather their own crises.
Scofield’s writing is unembellished and matter-of-fact, with both descriptions and dialogue delivered in simple, declarative sentences. The narrative is told from several different characters’ points of view, most prominently Eleanor’s. These characters—practical Eleanor, nurturing Helve, troubled Juni, affable Walt, and ineffectual Nick—are well-drawn and relatable, though their motivations are sometimes opaque. For example, what exactly turns Nick from a young man full of potential into a “sad slug of a man” is never made clear (people barely speaking to one another is a recurring theme). Karin’s illnesses (mental and physical) are never specified, seeming to exist simply as a foundation for other plot elements. There are instances of dire foreshadowing that fail to pay off dramatically, and several incidents with minor figures, such as Eleanor’s elderly neighbor, are digressions from the central family drama rather than support for it (though they do serve to illustrate the haphazard way mundane and profound elements are often jumbled together in life). So much happens so quickly that, at times, the novel reads almost like a summary of a much longer epic drama. Still, the author’s keen observation of human emotion is insightful and authentic.